WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has added a fourth customer to its launch manifest for the still-in-development New Glenn rocket. “We are honored to have SKY Perfect JSAT as a customer for an early New Glenn launch,” Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s chief executive, told SpaceNews. “They are the biggest commercial satellite operator in Asia and highly respected. The whole team at Blue thanks SKY Perfect JSAT for placing its trust in us to take them to orbit.” The Jeff Bezos-owned company also announced March 12 that mu Space, a Thai startup,…

U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith took command of the 45th Space Wing in August 2015. As of this writing, 50 satellites have gone to space under his watch. The 50th was Luxembourg’s GovSat-1 that flew Jan. 31 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. “That started a 30-day cycle when we’ll do four launches,” Monteith told SpaceNews. The second of those four was last week’s Falcon Heavy debut, soon to be followed by a late February launch of a Falcon 9 carrying the Hispasat 30W-6 communications satellite and a…

BROOMFIELD, Colo. — As commercial suborbital vehicles capable of carrying both payloads and people prepare to enter service, NASA officials say they’re willing to consider allowing agency-funded researchers to fly on those vehicles. In an interview after a speech at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference here Dec. 19, Steve Jurczyk, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said the agency would be open to allowing researchers funded by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program to fly on suborbital spacecraft to carry out their experiments. “As principal investigators propose, both internal to NASA and…

The future of low-cost, commercial space travel just got a whole lot brighter. Blue Origin, a privately funded aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, successfully took 25 customers on a short space trip last week aboard the company’s Crew Capsule 2.0 spacecraft. This was the seventh mission the company’s New Shepard rocket has flown and was aptly called Mission 7 (M7). Blue Origin is known for being pretty secretive about the aerospace projects it undertakes, but M7 achieved a huge milestone by take carrying 12 commercial, research, and education experiments…

BROOMFIELD, Colo. — After carrying out a successful test flight of a new version of its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft, a Blue Origin executive said Dec. 18 that the company was now about a year away from starting to fly people. Speaking at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) here, Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is director of safety and mission assurance for Blue Origin, said the Dec. 12 flight of the vehicle from Blue Origin’s test site in West Texas was a major milestone for the company.…

NEW ORLEANS — Blue Origin said it carried out a successful test flight of a new version of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle Dec. 12. In a statement issued about 11 hours after the flight, the company said that the “Mission 7” suborbital test flight of New Shepard, using a new propulsion module and crew capsule, went as planned. “Today’s flight of New Shepard was a tremendous success,” Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said in a statement. “It marks the inaugural flight of our next-generation Crew Capsule as…

Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster touches down in Texas after a successful test. (Blue Origin Photo) More Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his space venture, Blue Origin, launched the latest version of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship today for the company’s first test flight in 14 months, with an instrumented test dummy seated aboard. “He had a great ride,” Bezos said tonight in a tweet. The uncrewed, straight-up, straight-down trip was conducted at Blue Origin’s testing ground in West Texas. The video that Bezos included with his tweet showed the…

WASHINGTON — An airspace closure notice published by the Federal Aviation Administration Dec. 9 suggests Blue Origin is preparing to resume test flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle after a hiatus of more than a year. The Notice to Airman, or NOTAM, published by the FAA on its website Dec. 9 closes airspace above Blue Origin’s test site between Dec. 11 and 14, from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern each day. The closure is to “provide a safe environment for rocket launch and recovery.” The NOTAM does not…